I had this poster when I was a kid, only recently discovering that it was created by Tom Shadyac, the director who now lives in Memphis. We ran into him at [REDACTED] when we were buying tile for our bathroom remodel. Small fucking world.

Remember the poster Are You A Preppie? It was printed in 1979 by University of Virginia undergrad Tom Shadyac, who went on to film school at UCLA and later directed Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Evan Almighty. The poster was wildly popular when it came out. I have to wonder whether it might have inspired Lisa Birnbach’s more in-depth anthropological treatment in The Official Preppy Handbook, which appeared one year later.

So there’s a British fellow named Thomas Morris. He was a BBC radio producer for 17 years, but he’s a full-time writer now – with a blargh. I’ll just let him tell it …

I began writing this blog while writing my first book The Matter of the Heart, a popular history of heart surgery … The book traces the evolution of the discipline from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the present day, and looks at some of the most exciting recent developments in the field. Researching that book entailed many hours spent reading early medical journals. These publications are full of extraordinary and often scarcely believable stories, which though irrelevant to the book seemed too good to waste. In my spare time I’ve collected some of the most quirky, bizarre or surprising cases I’ve encountered, all drawn from the pre-twentieth century medical literature.

In his second punk documentary, filmmaker Danny “Looking for Johnny” Garcia takes a deep dive into the life and legacy of the Dead Boys front man. Included in STIV is some rare footage and lore about Stiv’s surprising career before and after the Dead Boys, as well as the hilarious stories and hijinks one associates with the punk legend who died at age 40 in 1990.

Jump in around the eight minute mark to watch these guys eat the Carolina Reaper, AKA the hottest pepper known to man.

In the first season of Hot Ones, host Sean Evans proved that there’s no wing he can’t handle. But the world of spicy foods doesn’t end at Mad Dog 357 hot sauce. To train for Season 2 and ensure his invisibility on the Hot Ones stage, Sean met up with a true legend of the chili world—Denmark’s ghost-pepper-popping Chili Klaus—to take on the hottest chili pepper known to man, the Carolina Reaper. Special thanks to “Smokin’ Ed” Currie of PuckerButt Pepper Company in South Carolina for providing the heat.

If you bled when you brushed your teeth this morning, you might want to get that seen to. We may finally have found the long-elusive cause of Alzheimer’s disease: Porphyromonas gingivalis, the key bacteria in chronic gum disease.

That’s bad, as gum disease affects around a third of all people. But the good news is that a drug that blocks the main toxins of P. gingivalis is entering major clinical trials this year, and research published today shows it might stop and even reverse Alzheimer’s. There could even be a vaccine.

Multiple research teams have been investigating P. gingivalis, and have so far found that it invades and inflames brain regions affected by Alzheimer’s; that gum infections can worsen symptoms in mice genetically engineered to have Alzheimer’s; and that it can cause Alzheimer’s-like brain inflammation, neural damage, and amyloid plaques in healthy mice.

“When science converges from multiple independent laboratories like this, it is very compelling,” says Casey Lynch of Cortexyme, a pharmaceutical firm in San Francisco, California.

In the new study, Cortexyme have now reported finding the toxic enzymes – called gingipains – that P. gingivalis uses to feed on human tissue in 96 per cent of the 54 Alzheimer’s brain samples they looked at, and found the bacteria themselves in all three Alzheimer’s brains whose DNA they examined.

… while they had the world’s ears and eyeballs, they did their best to spread to the masses the prophetic, only half-satirical “Theory of Devolution” that gave them their name. One of the funniest moves they pulled to that end was to serve as their own opening band in the guise of “Dove, the Band of Love.” To satirize the devolution-proving emergence of that puritanical, self righteous, money-hungry, and censorious strain of Christian Evangelicalism that was beginning its pernicious spread through American political and cultural life—and which remains disturbingly powerful still—Dove (an anagram for DEVO, if you didn’t catch that) performed tepid, bowdlerized, Jesused-up versions of DEVO songs, wearing cheap leisure suits and accountants’ visors.